Bookmarking Oracle Metalink in IE or Firefox

This may well be obvious, but….

If you try and save the link to a Metalink note whilst you are actually in the Note, it doesnt always work very well.

Typically you get:

  • Name:ShowDoc

  • URL:https://www.metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/f?p=130:14:42099925743 7239999::::p14_database_id,p14_docid,p14_show_header,p14_show_help,p14_b lack_frame,p14_font:NOT,1066139.6,1,1,1,helvetica,yada,yada,yada

There are two problems with this:

  • the Name’s not very useful, and more significantly,
  • the URL won’t work

The URL doesn’t work because of the string of numbers prior to the 4 consecutive colon’s. My guess is that this represents the login credentials of your current session, and these won’t work once you terminate that session or after you’ve re-booted your PC.

I currently use a couple of workarounds for this. Both involve right-clicking on a link to the page you’re currently on, so one way or another you have to navigate away from that page. It’s a bit manky, but it does seem to work.

Either:

  1. Go to the top of the note
  2. click on the ‘Bookmark’ link (at the top right).
  3. This takes you into your own personal list of Metalink bookmarks.
  4. Right-clink on the bookmark you’ve just saved
  5. select ‘Bookmark this link’ (Firefox), ‘Add to Favourites’ (IE)

Sporadically I then delete all of the bookmarks on my Metalink bookmark page.

Or:

  1. Use the back arrow, to go back to the page you came from
  2. Right-clink on the bookmark you’ve just saved
  3. select ‘Bookmark this link’ (Firefox) or ‘Add to Favourites’ (IE)

You then get the title of the note in the Bookmark, and a working URL. You need to already be logged into Metalink for it to work, though.

I think I had this working with del.icio.us as well, but since there was some sort of change to the Metalink login, the URL of the page doesn’t persist through the login screen.

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